[Guest]

If you want to make rain using a filter, rather than by hand or relying on the rain in the sim, the first thing to do is to get this freeware plugin:

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins_snowflakes.html

[Guest]

Don't be put off because it's called a "Snowflake" filter. It has a lot of other nifty uses as well! :wink:

[Guest]

For now, just download the filter and install it into Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. It will work in either of those. Don't know what else it may or may not work with but most people doing composites or complex edits work with one of those two programs. :wink:

[Guest]

The user interface may look very imposing but don't let that throw you off. It's really very simple and easy to use. Most of the controls are sliders. Once you know what they do, the whole thing is a piece of cake :wink:

[Guest]

These are the features of the "Snowflake" filter:

Full control over shape and size of the snowflakes.
Any number of snowflakes possible.
Configurable color.
Fully anti-aliassed.
Renders correctly on (partially) transparent images.
Reliable preview.
High precision calculations.
Complete help system available.
Save and load settings.
Supports any resolution.
Supports 8-bit RGB, grayscale and Duotone color modes.

As you can see, it's very flexible which makes it a useful plugin.

[Guest]

Here's an image of the user interface:



Let's go through the controls one at a time.

[Guest]

The first slider is "Amount". If you move it all the way to the left, there are no "snowflakes". If you move it all the way to the right, there is a huge amount of snowflakes. So, you'll be using it somewhere in between these two settings.

Let's see what this looks like against a black background.

[Guest]

This is what it looks like with the slider more to the left and fewer "snowflakes".

[Guest]

This is how it looks if we move the slider to the right for a greater amount of "snowflakes".

[Guest]

In both of the above images the sliders of the filter were left in the default position except for the "Amount" slider. So that only thing we have changed is the amount of snowflakes.

[Guest]

The next slider is "Minimum Size" but we can't consider that slider by itself because it works in conjuction with the "Maximum Size" slider to give us the effect we want.

[Guest]

There are several things we can do with these two sliders. We can:

-Make all of the snowflakes the same size

-Make snowflakes of a variety of sizes with just one click.

-Control how many different sizes of snowflakes there will be

-Determine how big and how small the max and min size of the snowflakes

[Guest]

If we set both sliders to the same size then we will get snowflakes of one uniform size. They can all be of small size or they can all be of large size depending upon whether both sliders are more to the left, small, or more to the right, large.

[Guest]

By setting the two sliders in different positions we can get a range of sizes of snowflakes. If there is a small difference between the settings of the two sizes we will get a small range of sizes. If there is a large difference between the settings of the two sizes we will see snowflakes of a wide variety of sizes.

[Guest]

If we set the sliders at different settings but with both of them to the left we will get a variety of sizes but all of the snwoflakes will be relatively small. If we set the sliders at different settings with both of them more to the right we will get a variety of sizes but all of the snowflakes will be relatively large.